TV Tropes/The Second Google Incident

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This page is about the very earliest events which eventually led to the original TV Tropes Wiki's enthusiastic embrace of censorship as a way of keeping the money rolling in life. It is maintained here as a historical record. All links to the TV Tropes Forums are retained for the morbidly curious, although there is no guarantee that they still exist, thanks to constant Stalinization. TV Tropes has always been at war with Eastasia.
— The Mgmt.


After The Google Incident, the problem with Google Adsense was thought solved: Adsense was disabled on pages contrary to Google's policy, and some alternate advertisers were found to reduce the wiki's dependency to it. This proved not to be enough when somebody complained to Google about the Naughty Tentacles page (which already had Adsense disabled), and Google pulled the plug again.

This led to several new measures:

  • The offending page joined the Permanent Red Link Club, with a custom message. More broadly, Porn Tropes in general were un-paged as well.
  • A new content policy was established.
  • To review pages which might violate the new policy, a council of five tropers was established.
  • Massive rename of trope pages. Notably, the "Rape Is Okay/Funny If..." pages were renamed to "Double Standard Rape", which now has various categories replacing all those pages.
  • Massive cut of work pages documenting works with alleged offensive contents or pedophile overtones. Many of these pages will be reviewed by a council being formed by the mods to determine whether they truly fall afoul of the no-pedophilia-friendly-works policy; if they don't, they will be restored.
  • There was some talk of shutting down the forums for good. In response, some tropers have started to consider setting up alternate forums.

Update 6/12:

For more info, read this thread - it should point you to the right place.